Tag: Orienteering

At this time of year with the good weather is when the outdoor team are in demand. Tim was in Tong School to do the Bronze Youth Navigator Award.

The session started with some time in classroom (it can be done outside but needs good weather otherwise the paper disintegrates) the young people created an ‘island’ on the classroom floor using a rope as the shore and then populated it with buildings and features. They then drew their own map of the island. This give the opportunity to talk about scale, how to denote features with symbols and the importance of the key.

This lead to talking about how important it is to orientate the map and touching on North, South, East and West.

The class were then given a map of the school grounds where Tim had already set out twenty orienteering clippers. With a score card, a map and a quick refresher on orientating the map outside the class set off to navigate around the course around the school.

At the end of the session there was a recap of the essential point of orientating the map and the whole class had completed their Bronze award.

The first term of 2018 has seen a few school groups braving the cold weather to get outside and complete their Young Navigator Bronze Awards. P5 & 6 at Tong Primary had some classes with their teacher Mrs Emmott, and then Andrew and Isi went in to finish up with an orienteering challenge around the school grounds. Whilst they were out and about, we asked them to point out where they were on the map, orientate it correctly to North, and show us the route they were planning to take. They also looked at symbols, scale and compasses. They are now well on their way to being able to navigate themselves around the great outdoors, so parents if you’re planning to take them out feel free to get them practicing!